Plasma is used in the production of semiconductors in processes such as plasma etching, ionized physical vapor deposition (iPVD) and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). Plasma is often produced for such applications by capacitively coupling energy into a processing gas in a vacuum chamber to dissociate molecules of the gas into reactive free radicals and atoms, to excite molecules, radicals and ions of the gas into higher electronic states, to ionize molecules and atoms of reactive and inert gas, and to accelerate ions into trajectories normal to the surface of a substrate and onto the substrate.
In PECVD plasma processing applications, capacitive coupling may be used to dissociate and excite molecules of a processing gas into reactive free radicals so that a desired thin film can be grown on the substrate. In plasma etch applications, capacitive coupling of a plasma may be used to activate a process gas to remove material from the substrate, either by exciting reactive atoms or radicals in a process known as reactive ion etching (RIE) or by ionizing atoms of inert gas in a process commonly referred to as sputter etching. In iPVD, a capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) may be used as a primary plasma source to produce ions of coating material or may be used in connection with a separate substrate table bias, to collimate the flux of coating material ions at the substrate or to ionize inert gas atoms and accelerate ions to the substrate in a post-deposition sputter etch step.
A simple CCP processing application involves the placing of a substrate on an electrode that is biased with radio frequency (RF) power. The electrode and substrate are enclosed in a grounded vacuum chamber that serves as an outer electrode. This arrangement requires high and often excessive RF voltages to generate sufficient plasma density to perform the process efficiently. Such high voltages can damage devices in integrated circuits as well as cause arcing within the chamber. Further, with such systems, plasma uniformity and subsequently etch or deposition uniformity on the substrate are unpredictable and often unsatisfactory. Typically, etch and deposition uniformity are dependent on details of the process environment, such as the shapes of shields, the locations of gas injection ports, and other chamber features. Further, using a delicate substrate exclusively as an electrode usually results in excessive substrate temperature.
Attempts to overcome the limitations of CCPs described above have involved the use of magnetic enhancement near the substrate support electrode. This enhancement can be produced by use of a magnetic field of an appropriate magnitude oriented parallel to an RF biased substrate support to cause electrons near the electrode surface to move in cycloid orbits next to the plane of the electrode instead of moving away from it, as they would otherwise tend to do. As a result, the electrons in the plasma interact with the RF plasma sheath multiple times before being lost to the walls of the chamber. If the magnetic field forms a closed loop, the electrons have no fixed point of exit from the field and are trapped, potentially indefinitely, under the magnetic field. This trapping of electrons near the electrode surface results in larger amounts of energy being delivered to the electrons per volt of RF sheath potential. Hence, much smaller voltages are needed to achieve a given plasma density.
A major drawback of magnetic enhancement in the prior art plasma processing of integrated circuits is device damage due to non-uniform charging effects of the substrate. A non-uniform charge distribution along an insulated substrate surface results in voltage gradients across devices on the substrate, which can lead to voltage breakdown. Non-uniform charging of the substrate can be caused by strongly non-uniform plasma density across the substrate surface. Such non-uniformity in plasma can be caused by lines of magnetic flux intersecting the substrate surface at predominantly normal angles of incidence at different strengths across the surface of the substrate or in regions where the ionizing electrons are being produced.
An example of a magnetic enhancement at the substrate support in the prior art is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,449,977. The arrangement produces lines of magnetic field that are parallel to the surface of a substrate and act to induce cycloid orbits on localized regions of the substrate support called the cycloid regions. The resulting non-uniform plasma can be made axially symmetric in a time-averaged sense by rotating the arrangement during processing of the wafers. A main drawback of this scheme is the need for costly and complex rotating hardware.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a method and apparatus for the maintenance of a substantially uniform low voltage plasma adjacent a semiconductor wafer substrate for plasma processing.